1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic messaging including voice messaging systems. More particularly, embodiments of the invention relate to systems and methods for synchronizing messages across multiple recipients of the messages using disparate voice message systems.
2. Related Technology
Communication is an important part of everyday life and many individuals use more than one electronic device to communicate with others. Home telephones, office telephones, cellular telephones, and computers are examples of devices used by individuals to communicate. These devices enable individuals to communicate using, for example, voicemail, email, and instant messages.
Advantageously, many of these devices provide features that enable users to communicate at the convenience of the sender and/or the recipient. A sender of an email, for example, can send an email that is delivered directly to the mail box of the recipient. Similarly, a recipient of an email has control over when he or she opens or replies to the received email. Further, email users can easily set up their email accounts to forward received emails to other accounts. In addition, replying to email is easy and works universally. The reply address is included in the email message, so the receiving email system can easily address a reply to the originator.
While email can typically be used and synchronized across disparate email systems, voicemail cannot be easily managed or synchronized in the same way. Voicemail enabled devices have much more difficulty in coordinating voice messages. For instance, a user that has both an office voicemail box and a personal wireless voicemail box is typically required to access each system independently in order to retrieve the various voicemails that the user has received.
Further, forwarding messages between voicemail systems is generally not supported. Users can forward messages when both the sender's voicemail box and recipient's voicemail box are within the same voicemail system. However, it is not possible for a sender to forward a message to another voicemail box unless the intended recipient is on the same voicemail system. For example, if a user receives a voicemail message that he would like to share with a friend who uses a different voicemail system, today it is not technically possible to send that message to the friend.
Sending a reply message in response to a received voicemail message presents a similar problem. Today's voicemail messages have only one address—the caller's phone number in the case when caller ID is enabled. Since there is no standardized way to send a voice message to a phone number, there is no general mechanism in place that permits a user of a system to reply to a voice message with another message unless the originating caller is on the same voicemail system as the recipient. This forces the recipient to place a call to the original caller, which may not be what the recipient wants or needs to do, to answer a simple question, for example.
Another problem arises in situations where a single voicemail message is sent to an inbox, such as a common “auto-attendant” inbox, that is shared by multiple recipients. When a message is sent to the shared inbox, the message is pushed or synchronized to the multiple recipients' individual devices. Because the message is shared, however, once one recipient listens to the message, the message is designated as “heard” for all the recipients that have received the message, even though only one recipient has actually listened to the message. Thus, the inbox reflects the status of the message with reference to only one message recipient, rather than taking into account the status of the message in relation to each intended recipient.
As these examples show, the problem with voicemail systems is the lack of interconnect between the systems, making them useful only to act in the capacity of recording and delivering a message to a single recipient. A second problem exists in that checking messages is a very slow, linear process, and can involve each user dialing into several voice systems to retrieve all the user's messages. A need in the art exists for systems and methods that enable multiple users to manage their individual and shared messages including voice messages across disparate systems, and reply to, forward, or delete those messages just as the user manages email.